


The woman with six fingers

by spookalien



Category: Original Work
Genre: "a bit" like most of the fucking story is about losing fingers what do you expect, "kania" sounds more like "kanye" every time i say it and i hate it so much, Asharen, Gen, Rhajin, actually she is kinda dead by the time this story is told so, also some others who don't really do much:, and then never actually fucking appear in the goddamned book for fucks sake kania, i like characters who have lives that could make a book on their own, i mean it's not very graphic... kinda graphic, literally nobody asked for this, mild depictions of violence, several fingers are lost, so many hands were harmed, there is a bit with some blood and gore, which is not astonishing considering i have no friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-12 18:37:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10497117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookalien/pseuds/spookalien
Summary: 'There lived an old woman in my village - a woman who only had six fingers. This is the story of how those fingers became detatched from her hand, and the story of how she became the old woman she was when I had known her.'//a little world-building piece //





	

**Author's Note:**

> This used to be so short back when I had first written the idea down, and now - well it is definitely longer than it used to be.  
> Also no, the summary never appears in the actual story word by word - i don't think so, at least.
> 
> i wrote most of this on different days at 2 am  
> Enjoy.

'Why mark the entire hand, though?' Shian asks. He sits on the couch with one knee pulled up against his chest, his other leg hanging off. He is resting his chin on his knee and watching Maya with genuine interest on his face.

Maya shrugs in response.

'It shows commitment,' she answers and sinks back into her armchair. Both of her legs are pulled up and she lets go of the mug of tea she has been holding and balances it on her right knee. 'And it looks great.'

'It sounds as if the point of it is the choice and not quite the modern idea of love,' Rhajin says and looks up from where he is sitting on the floor. His back is pressed against the couch close to Shian's leg. The papers laid out in front of him on the coffee table are long abandoned. 'Although I am not too familiar with the culture,' he adds and his eyes slide off Maya, back to a mug on the table.

'Perhaps they are to show that they keep to their word,' Asharen offers. She is occupying the rest of the couch, half-lying on it, with a book on her stomach.

Maya nods slowly. 'Mama told me they were more about keeping the promise and living with the choices you make, than about love. You've got to live with the consequences, and you have to remember the choices you made.'

'Don't your mothers have bracelets, though?' Shian asks. His tone lacks any mockery.

Maya nods again. 'Mom loved the idea of wedding marks – was enamoured by them, as she told me, but they couldn't find anyone qualified to make them. Mama insisted that they would just be tattoos without the ceremony - and so they decided on bracelets until they would find someone who could do it right.'

Shian rubs his shoulder absentmindedly and leans back on the couch. 'It is still not a very divorce-friendly idea. What if one of them fucks up really bad. Or hurts the other, or if they simply want to divorce for whatever reason pops up.'

Maya stares at him with her eyebrows raised. 'What do  _you_  do? How are marks on a finger different from this?'

A grin spreads on Shian's face. 'There was a woman in my village with just 6 fingers left.'

'What the fuck,' Maya states. 'Left?'

Rhajin just turns his head to look at Shian questioningly.

Asharen snorts, amused. 'There is a whole story to that, isn't there?'

'Of course there is,' Shian nods and pulls his other leg up to sit cross-legged and lean forward. 'Her name was Kania, but most of us kids called her Nana. She was old when I knew her, and a baker, who sold extraordinary bread and pastries. They were really soft, you cannot find any of the like here in Dhavar. She made these fluffy buns that she would fill with sweet cream – anyway, for as long as any of us had known her, she had six fingers. And, of course, everyone in Khul had heard the gossip about how she had lost them.'

'According to the woodsmen, she lost her fingers to unhappy marriage once, and to hard work thrice. The people who were Nana's age would say she lost the first two to her husbands, and the other two for fashion, surely. Some others said she used to be a courtesan, who had her fingers cut off by envious men – or that she cut them off herself for each time she had fallen in love. Many kids thought she used to be a pirate, or a warrior of some kind, who lost her fingers is battle.'

'There was an endless supply of stories about Kania and her four lost fingers - and so one afternoon me and some other kids went to ask her about it.'

'She sat us down around her table - a low, round table, with lots of scratches covering the polished surface - and brings out some tea and buns for us. I suppose she wanted our mouths to be occupied so we wouldn't interrupt her as she told us about her life - revealed to us who she was, really. So she began without much further ado.'

'Her first husband was a sailor - I don't know how she managed to get hold of one on top of a mountain, but she did. He was often away, and he would write to her and send her a bundle of letters from every port they stopped at. Some of the letters would be simple, telling about his day, a diary of sorts, as if he wanted her to live them with him, to experience them along with him. Other letters would be of love and lust, and some would be stories he had heard from other sailors, or just stories of the people he had met. He came back to her as often as he could - until he didn't. It wasn't a process, the letters just stopped and he never showed up again. Kania waited for him, waited for her husband to return - she loved him very much. Of course, there were promises made, kept, and broken, but there was love, too. Kania, the young wife, waited for her husband for three years before she had accepted that he had died. Kania, the old woman who told us about him with a smile on her face loved him still. She then told us that she had cut her finger off with a butcher's blade, and travelled to the port her husband last sent her letters from, and tossed the finger into the waves, whispering a goodbye to her sailor.'

Shian pauses and runs his fingers through his hair.

'In a way it was inevitable that she would fall for the butcher, the one who had lent her his blade. She didn't love him the way she had loved the sailor, but she found she enjoyed the butcher's company - and his sex, as she put it. Now, talk about love and sex was not a taboo at any age, if the appropriate phrasing was used, but we winced at that, blushing and yelping, and covering our ears. This old woman, telling us kids about how they made love every other night, and how she could taste blood on his fingers sometimes after a hard day of work... I don't know how much that detail scarred us, but she laughed at us and continued her story.'

'Kania found out a year after their marriage that on nights he wasn't with her, he was with her sister, showing her, too, all that he knew about sex. You see, she and her sister were on quite awful terms, for reasons she didn't disclose elaborately. It had to with the sailor - I suspect her sister would have preferred a more stable and local man, or perhaps would have preferred to have the sailor for herself.'

'Either way, finding out about the butcher's cheating was a blow to Kania, and she wasn't sure what she would do with the butchering knife when she stormed into her sister's home and found the butcher there, naked and in the middle of the act. She felt like she could just put the knife through his skull, right there as he was on top of her sister, but she didn't. She told him that they needed to talk, and that they did. Sat down around the kitchen table, the three of them, and Kania looked at her husband, waiting, waiting for him to open his mouth so she would have the right spark. When he did finally began his string of well-crafted excuses, she took hold of his hand - the hand with the wedding mark on his little finger. She pressed it flat against the table and sliced off his finger without further ado, then got up and left.'

'She moved to the city after that, with just eight fingers left on her hands and the determination to work and live alone with the fingers she had left. It wasn't too long until she met a wealthy man, who fell for her and spoiled her - within a year, she was married again, with no love for the man in her heart, only for his money. She wanted a safe life, wanted to live peacefully, dressed in beautiful silks and fed good food. Then, after the wedding, the rich man took her home and introduced her to his four other wives.'

'Kania was shocked, but she thought, you know what? This is not too bad, and the other wives seemed friendly enough. She was surprised to find there was no competition between them, and she soon came to love them. Some wives came, and some went; those who had fallen pregnant always went away when their child was born. The man told them that they got money and a house where they could raise their child, but he just couldn't do that. That was his only flaw as far as they were concerned. Having several wives, perhaps, was a flaw in itself as well, but he never hurt them and they didn't mind it. They were living comfortably, after all. Kania told us about how sometimes he would be with them alone, and sometimes all of them. "He needed variety in his life," she had told us with a wink.'

'Everything changed, however, when one night one of the wives came rushing back to the wives' room, covered in sweat and crying her eyes out. She had found a room, a room that was usually locked, but it wasn't now, and in there she had found unimaginable things. In there, she had found the remains of human bodies, both large and too small, too small to be considered. Bones on the ground and on tables, meat kept in large iceboxes. The remains of the wives who had fallen pregnant. One of the wives had the awful thought that they had been fed their flesh before.'

'They decided to cut off their wedding fingers - and they did. They went to confront the husband, then, told him that they knew, and as two of the strongest wives held him down and his mouth open, they each shoved their sliced off wedding finger down his throat until he choked.'

'They took care of the remains that night. The man, they put him in that horrid room that smelled of blood. The dead and rotten wives and babies - those they were unable to tell apart by bones, so they put them to rest together. The chunks of flesh and bones and skin; they burnt them all. Kania told us they had opened every window and every door before they had finally gone away - all but the door of that ugly room, with the cannibal in it.' 

'They all went their own ways then, and Kania never heard from any of them again. They wanted to leave all that behind, the horror of that one night - they could never look each other in the eyes and not see every moment of that again.'

'After that, Kania remained in the city, even to her own surprise, and started working at a pharmacy, where she had met a merchant who had fallen ill to the common cold, and who was hilariously weakened by it – except for his sense of humour, which remained strong and healthy even as the man changed from light green to blue as he stood.'

'That was how she had met her fourth husband, a modestly rich and incredibly kind man, who was perhaps too emotional at times, but that didn't matter much to her. She figured she would grow old with him - he wasn't hard to live with, he was pleasant company and they shared the same sense of humour.'

'Then, after several years, the merchant told her that he wanted to die with her. Kania thought it was sweet, and told him so. Her husband corrected her; “I want to die with you tonight”, he told her. Turns out, his business had failed, his partners had all left, and now he was destined to slowly go poor and die in rags – but he had grown accustomed to pleasantries, and he was too proud to die _poor_. So he decided that suicide was the way to go, and he wanted to take Kania with him, too. He wanted to take with him the last thing he had – as Nana had phrased it.'

'She had begged him to reconsider, told him they would find another way – but no, he had decided. He had raised a gun to her head – first shoot her, then shoot himself, and be done and gone. When he hesitated, Kania jammed a kitchen knife into his neck and he bled out.'

'Kania took what was left of his money, cut her fourth finger off, and went back to Khul. Opened a bakery, a trade she had learnt when she was young and practised when she was bored. She never married again – but she did sell extraordinary pastries.'

Shian finishes with nostalgic smile instead of the smirk he started with. He crosses his arms in his lap and leans back.

Asharen smiles a half-amused, half-horrified smile. Her eyebrows have been raised for most of the story. She mouths something along the lines of 'by all the gods' but remains silent.

'I'm... not sure what we learnt,' Maya breaks the silence first. She is leaning on her hand, her fingers in her messed up hair, and her eyes wide.

'I am just glad men are not an option for me,' Asharen says and picks up her book from her stomach to stare at the pages and pretend to be reading.

Shian nudges Rhajin with his foot, who simply takes a long drink from his mug of coffee and shakes his head.

'No comment?' Shian asks.

'She had an _extraordinary_ life,' he says eventually.

'She wouldn't have had quite a story to tell if her entire hand had been marked,' Shian says and tilts his head. He looks at Maya, challenging her.

Maya looks back and frowns slightly. She already knows she would paint a portrait of Kania, and perhaps some sort of interpretation of the fascinating life she had.

But this is a challenge now, and she wasn't going to just agree outright.

'She wouldn't have been the wife of a cannibal, either.'

Shian opens his mouth and closes it again, then nods a couple of times. He sighs, nods once more, and says;

'Fair enough.'

**Author's Note:**

> If there are any grammar mistakes, please do tell.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
